Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Mobile Patents.

Horacio Gutierrez from Microsoft was the spokesperson for the announcement. Sending Horacio to speak to journalists is a waste of time, he will just repeat the message that PR approved which will be the same tired "others should not get a free ride on our innovations".

Patent licensing for software companies is a clear case of double-dipping. First they sell licenses to the software, and then they sell licenses to the patents. We will likely see more of this as these companies fail to compete with products in the marketplace and have to resort to patent licensing. But that is a subject for another day.

Today's subject is Microsoft patents on the mobile space and how Linux-based devices might infringe on those.

Chances are that Linux itself does not infringe on any of the mobile patents. After all, the Linux kernel and its userland are an evolution of the Unix operating system.

What might likely infringe is the mobile stack and the mobile applications that Android has built on top of a vanilla Linux.

As usualy, google.com/patents is the tool of choice for digging into this matter. Use inassignee:microsoft and the term mobile to get a good list of patents.

Microsoft over the years has filed for a lot of patents in this space, and searching for these patents shows an interesting story: Microsoft applied for all kinds of patents on what turned out to be dead-ends. The search results are littered with technologies that died, or bets that never panned out. These technologies could have gone somewhere if the Microsoft of the 1998-2004 was not dead set on owning every market. The world just routed around them and they were left with probably millions of dollars in wasted research and development.

Here are a few starting points of patents that could potentially hurt Android and might be worth invalidating:

May 21st 2001, 6865683: System and method for powering down a mobile device.

March 26th, 2004, 7317928: System and method for exposing instant messenger presence information on a Mobile Device. Google Talk on Android, other messenger systems and other unified IM presence tools (as found on Maemo and Nokia devices) likely infringe this on this one.

March 2, 2004, 7327349: Advanced navigation techniques for portable devices. It should be simple to invalidate this one as it is too late and the features are too obvious.